Hepatitis E virus (HEV) infections represent a major health problem in developing countries where epidemics primarily affect young to middle-- age adults. Although HEV does not lead to chronic hepatitis or cirrhosis, the infection is severe enough to warrant prevention. The overall goal of this proposal is to demonstrate that the capsid protein of HEV can self-assemble into particles that are morphologically similar to native HEV virions. We propose that self-assembled virus-like particles expressed from the HEV caps id protein would preserve conformational neutralizing epitopes and therefore be an ideal vaccine candidate for long-term protective immunity. The putative capsid protein will be expressed in several expression systems along with other putative structural proteins of the virus. Protein products will be inspected for the self-assembling of virus-like particles. Purified virus-like particles will then be tested for antigenicity to validate the conservation of immunologically important epitopes.